Advances in the design and manufacture of magnetic storage devices have significantly reduced the cost of such devices, as measured in terms of the cost per gigabyte of storage capacity. The relatively low cost of high storage capacity devices has resulted in the proliferation of large arrays of such devices, such as a Redundant Array of Independent Disks (RAID). Various manufacturers of storage devices commonly offer such RAIDs with proprietary software for controlling the individual storage devices within the RAID.
Storage devices from different manufactures often have different features. Combining storage devices from different manufacturer affords the ability to take advantage of the best features of each device. Unfortunately, no technique presently exists for low-level management of heterogeneous storage devices, such as a set of heterogeneous storage devices within a RAID. While software presently exists for managing RAIDs from different vendors across a network, such software lacks the ability to manage one or more storage devices from separate vendors in a single RAID, or to effectively manage a stand-alone storage device.
Thus, there is a need for a technique for managing one or more storage devices.